Irelands population highest in 160 years

Ireland is awash with babies. Who knows where they have come from but the best of luck to them.

A baby boom in the Republic of Ireland has pushed the population past a total it has not seen for 160 yearssince the great famine took hold and many decided that America was worth a crack.

Preliminary figures published by the Central Statistics Office show Ireland has a population of 4,581,269 people. The area which now makes up the Republic of Ireland has not had a population figure that high since 1851, after more than a million people died from starvation and disease in the Great Famine.

Another two million were lost through decades of emigration, a trend finally reversed in Ireland’s Celtic Tiger years in the last decade when immigration boomed.

Although growth has slowed since Ireland became an early victim of the Great Recession in 2008 strong birth rates have made up for the number of people leaving Irish shores.

So that must meann that when people stopped making money they started making babies.

Newswarped thinks that while the population of Ireland has topped 4.5 million, that is still well below the number of ‘Irish’ bars in the world.